


You know how to read my mind (I’m lost and it’s you I find)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: 5 Times, 5+1 Things, Coda, Fix-It of Sorts, Getting Together, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Pancakes, Steve comes home, Telepathic Bond, h50 episode 10.22
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23958781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “Hey buddy,” Danny says, when he answers his phone.Steve asks himself, after the fact, if calling was such a good idea. It probably wasn’t. He does his best to concentrate on Danny’s actual, real voice, not any of the lingering images on his mind. “Danno, yo. What’s up?”Or: Steve keeps thinking about pancakes. Danny keeps thinking about Steve, maybe. They have a little more in common than seems plausible.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 20
Kudos: 278





	You know how to read my mind (I’m lost and it’s you I find)

**Author's Note:**

> Technically this is a finale fix-it, but it honestly doesn’t care about what happened in canon all that much, so you could easily read it without knowing a single thing of what happens in 10.21 or 10.22, or season 10 at all, for that matter. The major thing is that Steve and Danny are in different locations. 
> 
> The title comes from the lyrics of _Telepathy_ by Christina Aguilera, which was for once a very deliberate choice, hee.

### 1.

Steve wakes up on the first day of his break in a hotel bed in Hong Kong with the sharpest, most vivid images of Waimanalo beach on his mind that he ever recalls having experienced outside of real life. It’s almost like he’s there.

In fact, he can see that too – himself, standing there with the surf playing around his ankles, grinning just this side of cocky and turning away, towards the sea, leaving every inch of his body perfectly on display because all he’s wearing is a pair of clingy wet boardshorts. It’s weird not for the content of the thought (Hawaii, the beach, boardshorts, those all make sense), but for the feelings that come with it. He’s never been this turned on by the sight of his own body before. Before he can dive into what that means (is he worryingly narcissistic? is he having a midlife crisis? is he clinging to the remnants of his own physical attractiveness now that he’s truly starting to be able to trace the passage of time on his own face?) the mental image moves again and Danny comes up behind him. He’s wearing those dark blue swim shorts he bought last spring. One of Danny’s hands slides around to rest over Steve’s heart and he kisses the curve of Steve’s neck and-

“Hey buddy,” Danny says, when he answers his phone.

Steve asks himself, after the fact, if calling was such a good idea. It probably wasn’t. He does his best to concentrate on Danny’s actual, real voice, not any of the lingering images on his mind. “Danno, yo. What’s up?”

“Not much.” Danny sounds good, relaxed. Steve can’t sound too off either, or Danny would have instantly called him out on it. “We’re at the beach with half the team. Tani’s giving Charlie pointers on his surfing technique and I’m keeping an eye out to make sure she doesn’t accidentally let him drown.”

Steve feels a pang – he would’ve liked to do that for Charlie – but it’s not hard to find a distraction, because- “The beach? You’re at the beach?”

“Yeah. Maybe you don’t remember this now that you’ve been gone for a whole twenty-four hours, but Hawaii’s kinda famous for having those. Charlie hadn’t been to Waimanalo in a while. Why?”

Steve grows aware he’s sitting up in the middle of the bed, so he scoots back until he has some support from the headboard. He might need it. He’s feeling a little woozy. “No, nothing. No reason.”

Danny huffs. “Your getaway definitely hasn’t made you any more forthcoming yet.”

That helps settle him in ways little else could have. “I haven’t been gone for a day, Danny,” he shoots back, and just like that, everything is normal again. He’s probably imagining things, confused by the jetlag or still paranoid from all the shit that went down because of Doris’s cipher. That must be it.

After Tani, Junior, Quinn and Charlie have all yelled hello at Danny’s phone and the call ends, Steve gives up on sleep and heads down to the hotel lobby for breakfast, on his own because Catherine is probably still asleep in her room. The menu boasts a few options for pancakes, so he decides to give the blueberry ones a try. They’re pretty good, but they’re not Danny’s, so they’re disappointing anyway.

*

### 2.

The second morning, Steve wakes up in much the same way, except the image is different. He’s starting to suspect these thoughts are what woke him up both times in the first place.

There’s a bed and he’s in it. The setting is very clearly his room at home instead of a generic hotel and he doesn’t seem to be wearing a shirt, but the sheet effectively covers up whether he’s wearing anything at all. After yesterday he has an inkling of where this might be going, except things take a turn when he suddenly has a tray in his lap and Danny is standing next to the bed, having just delivered a breakfast consisting of coffee and slightly burned scrambled egg and perfect toast and now bending over, cupping a careful hand around the back of Steve’s head and moving in close, closer, close enough that his lips touch to Steve’s temple. Steve’s heart skips a beat (the real one? the imaginary one? both?) as he watches Danny round the bed and shed his T-shirt so he can climb back in. It’s so stupidly domestic Steve wouldn’t have known he had it in him to come up with it. His heart, skipping or not, aches.

On a hunch, he makes a blind grab for his phone and hits speed dial.

“What’re you doing today?” he asks, the moment the call starts being timed on his screen. He doesn’t wait for _0:01_ to hit.

Danny makes an offended noise, which doesn’t really mean anything, because he’s always doing that. “Are you just going to keep calling me in the middle of every day to ask me about my plans? I’m fine, okay. I’m not locked away in my room pining for you.”

Steve breathes out. He hadn’t been thinking that, but it’s good to know anyway. A look at his watch on the nightstand and some quick mental math tell him it should be about noon yesterday in Honolulu. “Your room?” he asks, rolling with it. “What room would that be? Last I checked, you were still crashing at mine and didn’t have a room.”

“Last I checked, you skipped town, so yours was up for grabs.”

Steve’s strange feeling slams into him again with a vengeance. “That’s not how it works.”

“Well, tough luck.” Something in the background on Danny’s end of the line creaks exactly like Steve’s bed when a grown man puts his weight on it. “I’m here and you’re not, so I think the choice is up to me, and I choose to appropriate this very nice place to sleep.”

Steve falls back on the hotel mattress. It doesn’t make a sound and the ceiling is the wrong shade of white. “Are you in my bedroom right now?” 

“I’m in _my_ bedroom, yes, that’s correct. I’m doing some redecorating, if you must know.”

Steve is starting to feel like maybe he mustn’t, because this is headed in an ever more bizarre direction. “Huh. I was just thinking-”

“Just thinking what?”

He tries to recall the vivid images from before, but he can’t. They’re as easy to grasp as smoke in the wind, and maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe that’s all it ever was and his gut it just giving him confused signals because he’s going through something. “That I really liked my room as it was, and you better not do too much redecoration,” is what he settles on. It’s not like that’s a lie.

“Oh, buddy,” Danny says, “the more you protest, the pinker it’s going to get.”

Steve knocks on Cath’s door this time before he heads down to the restaurant, because she said she would have been up to join him yesterday. It’s nice; having breakfast with a friend keeps him from spending all his time mulling over how odd his mornings have been. He orders a different iteration of the same pancakes, and they’re still disappointing, but he gets a decent bridge out of it that allows him to tell Cath about Danny’s inexplicable predilection for ruining perfectly good pancakes with boysenberry syrup, so it’s not a total loss.

*

### 3.

Maybe, he figures, the problem is just that Hong Kong time forces him to sleep until what would normally have been the middle of the afternoon for him in Honolulu. Time zones can commit some pretty good fuckery on a person’s mind. 

That’s why at the end of the second day, he says goodbye to Catherine in Chek Lap Kok Airport and boards another plane, headed further west. He briefly calls Danny when he touches down in Berlin to let him know the flight went well, but it’s not inspired by any strange images and the call doesn’t invoke any of them either. Things, by all known measures, are going great. Despite catching a few hours of sleep on the plane, he’s gone thirty hours without any mental experiences stranger than enjoying airplane food. 

He checks into a new hotel, accepts that it’s still early morning in Germany, and goes out and has pancakes for breakfast again, this time in a little place right across from where he’s staying. There’s no banana chocolate chip on the menu, which is what he really craves, but they do a very good coco and spinach smoothie. It’s green enough that it makes him smile involuntarily every time he looks at it. The faces Danny would pull if he could see it would be glorious.

He’s distracted and lacking a couple hours of sleep, so maybe that’s why it creeps up on him so gradually this time.

At first, he thinks he’s just seeing Danny in his own mind because he’s already thinking of him, but then the scene gets so bright, so true to life, that he can smell the meatballs and spaghetti that’s being served. There’s not a pancake in sight anywhere, but he and Danny are sitting at a small table in an empty restaurant, kind of like the one they tried to build together. Danny grins at their server and so does Steve, and there are more wrinkles on their faces and grey in their hair than Steve remembers or would ever admit to, but it’s their proud expressions that are odd enough that he starts paying attention to the guy bringing them their food, and that’s- That’s Charlie. He’s in his late twenties at least, far past being a cute little kid, but that grown man standing there wearing a chef’s hat that has a name stitched on the front, exactly like the one Steve once bought for Danny, that’s definitely actually Danny’s son, no doubt about it. 

Steve is kicked back into the present when he bites his own tongue. For a moment, he’s surprised at the sweet taste of a German’s imitation of an American pancake in his mouth, instead of what was very obviously grandma Williams’ secret meatball recipe as prepared by Charlie two decades into the future.

He sits there for a moment, fully experiencing his throbbing tongue. He’s awake. He’s wide awake, so the entire scene can’t have been a dream or remnant of it. He was thinking about Danny, but he wasn’t thinking about Charlie, or at least not consciously. It came on out of nowhere.

Before he can debate the wisdom of calling Danny, his phone starts ringing. He answers without checking to see who it is. “I’ll give you three guesses for what Charlie told me he wants to be while I was putting him to bed,” Danny says, sounding like he’s got a good secret that he’ll enjoy revealing to Steve slow enough that he can torture Steve with it a little.

Steve feels kind of punched in the chest. “Owner of a restaurant.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Yeah, actually.” Danny sounds deeply suspicious. It’s about damn time he joins Steve in that feeling. “How on earth did you get that on the first try? Has he told you this before?”

“Maybe I can just read your mind.” Steve laughs at his own joke, but more because it’s starting to freak him out than because there’s anything funny about it.

“Yeah, right,” Danny says, and drops the issue in favor of a dramatic retelling of Five-0’s latest case, which involved Danny and Lou claiming seniority and making the newest members of the team draw straws to decide who would have to dig through the excrements of a victim’s dog to retrieve a ring it had swallowed and that was important to the case for some reason.

Steve is listening, but he’s not really paying attention. He herds syrup from one end of his pancakes to the other with one hand while holding the phone to his ear with the other, but his mind is in a third place. In no way is it odd that he keeps thinking of Danny, but the overwhelming, life-like quality of the thoughts and their extreme specificity border on scary anyway, not to mention the way they seem to match perfectly to whatever Danny is doing at the time, even while he’s oceans away. All of it contains ideas he’s never had before and they tackle him out of nowhere, taking over his mind, like Danny barreling into a room and forcing Steve to drop everything to answer whatever argument Danny has decided to start.

Except of course for how they’re not arguments. Steve doesn’t know what to call them instead, but they’re not arguments. It’s a different kind of dance.

*

### 4.

He occupies a table all by himself in the fairly busy brunch place across from the hotel and has pancakes for breakfast again. They haven’t magically gotten any better, but the smoothie remains a highlight. By now, he’s expecting the images, but he’s still not braced for their intensity, just like the desk isn’t braced, scuffing over the floor in tiny increments because Steve is bent over it and Danny is-

“I think I left a plant in my office,” he tells Danny, who of course picks up on the first ring. “A fern.”

“Your office.” The hesitation is slight, so brief really that it’s barely there, but Steve knows Danny’s speech patterns. He’s listened to him talk every single day for ten years and he knows when Danny is even the slightest bit taken aback. It can’t be the implied request and there’s nothing new about Steve calling out of the blue or electing to get right to the point, so it must be something else.

“Yeah. Are you far away?”

“No. I’m at headquarters right now, actually.”

Bingo. It’s 7:54 in Central Europe, meaning it should be 19:54 Hawaii standard time, so either Danny is working late, or he had one of those days where he didn’t come into the office until noon and is now trying to catch up. Steve will tell him to go home in a moment, but he has different priorities for the time being. “Really? Where exactly?”

A beat. Then, a touch defensively in a way that makes little sense for their conversation so far: “I was looking for a pen.”

“Yeah? Where?” He knows he’s pushing. He knows he has to, or he’s going to end up even crazier and more paranoid than he might already be at this point.

“At your desk,” Danny says, like he’s dreading it, like he wishes he could say something else without lying.

Steve does not burst into hysterical laughter, but it’s a near thing. Not so paranoid after all. “Oh, wow. That’s lucky.”

“Yeah, it sure is. I’ll water your abandoned fern.” There’s another pause for breath that lasts just long enough it could be called a brief silence. Steve imagines Danny would be checking the corners of the room right now; it’s what he would do. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to have installed some crazy spyware on my phone or anything, right?”

“No,” Steve says. “Why?”

“Hidden cameras following me around?”

Obviously, there are none, but if Danny keeps asking Steve might have to come up with a different excuse and since that’s a category filled with emptiness, too, it might be best to execute a strategic withdrawal for the time being. “Okay, I’m hanging up now.”

“Yeah, that’s probably for the best,” Danny says, and Steve tries very, very hard to convince himself the overlap in phrasing is just pure coincidence. How many ways are there to express one concept in the English language, really?

Five minutes later, Steve’s phone beeps. _Checked every corner, there is no fern. Want me to water the fish on your screensaver?_

_Oops,_ he shoots back, forgot I gave it to Jerry as a goodbye present. The beauty of it is that he did, so if Danny follows up on this lead, he’ll find nothing but corroboration. Steve knows a thing or two about decent alibis.

*

### 5.

For his fifth breakfast he orders room service. He doesn’t feel like going out and he figures there’s no point in flying halfway around the world in search of something indefinable if he then still ends up denying himself simple pleasures for no reason. He’s pretty sure that’s Danny’s voice in his head, but it’s not real enough to be concerning and Danny does, on occasion, have an opinion that carries real merit, so he sees no reason not to listen to it.

He orders two of every type of pancake the hotel kitchen says they can make and ends up with a stack that someone divided over two plates to minimize the risk of tower collapse during transport. It’s probably more than he can eat, but there’s this gnawing feeling in his gut that’s been growing and growing for days now and he knows it’s not hunger, but it can’t hurt to doublecheck. Besides, this is a good way to find out if any of these pancakes are worth eating at all or if Danny has officially ruined him for anyone else.

He catches a drop of syrup on his finger to keep the bottle opening clean and at the sight of it on his bare skin, his thoughts go down a messy, shamefully well-worn path. He’s seen Danny slather pancakes in syrup – with respect, but liberally and with great gusto – and he can’t help but imagine Danny, licking syrup off of-

His phone rings. He has to suck his finger clean in a hurry before he can answer.

“Pancakes,” Danny says, agitated. “Were you- Have you been-”

Steve, sitting at the little table in his temporary room, doesn’t have many places to look that don’t put the item in question in his field of vision. There is no escaping the mediocre pancakes. “Every morning,” he agrees, thoroughly freaked out and so relieved by it.

Danny is going through the same thing. Steve knows, because all Danny says is, “Son of a bitch.” 

“What are you thinking?” He cringes at his own wording immediately after. It’s a reflex question, because he’s always interested in the general subject and what’s going on in Danny’s mind is often difficult to track.

Used to be-?

No. He’s not going down that road.

“This is creepy,” Danny says.

Again, Steve answers before he gives it due consideration. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

There’s a moment of silence that feels shockingly awkward considering it’s just between the two of them, and Steve usually thinks there isn’t much that can throw them anymore. Danny is the first to break the quiet. That’s far, far less shocking. “I can’t make you breakfast while you’re on the other side of the world,” he says, plainly. “How’s that for a fun fact?”

Steve considers it, and while it’s not strictly speaking something he didn’t know yet, he figures it’s more than good enough.

*

### +1.

He wakes up thinking of pancakes. He can smell them, and the reason why becomes apparent when Danny enters the room, carrying a tray with a plate on it. “You’re awake,” Danny says. He doesn’t sound surprised, and there’s no hesitation between the moment he sets the tray down in Steve’s lap and when he leans in. Steve tilts his face up, seeking, so Danny’s lips land on his instead of on his forehead.

“You made me pancakes.” Steve is too freshly woken up to even try to hide his delight as he alternately watches Danny round the bed to get back under the covers beside him, and the gift dropped literally in his lap. “Real ones.” They’re speckled with blueberries. There’s a bottle of syrup with them, and it’s not boysenberry, because Danny knows who he’s dealing with. 

“I was feeling generous,” Danny says, and Steve wonders if he’ll ever stop falling a little more in love with Danny every time Danny makes him food. 

He also wonders if Danny has had breakfast yet. That’s something he could find out by asking, but he could also carefully set the tray aside, tackle Danny to the bed and lick into his mouth to find out, so he does just that. Danny sees him coming and is already laughing, but it changes nothing except the ease of the movements and how open Danny’s body is to him when he arrives. Danny lifts the hem of Steve’s sleep shirt the moment Steve wishes he could get rid of it; Steve rolls onto his back a sliver of a breath before Danny starts to push. Steve links a hand in Danny’s hair and pulls him close for another kiss and he honestly doesn’t know if that’s an idea that came from his mind or from Danny’s, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference these days.

They jointly end up forgetting the blueberry pancakes, and by the time they remember, there’s very little syrup left in the bottle.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Fun fact: pancakes are a dinner food where I come from (and more often savory than sweet) and I remember that the concept of having them for breakfast baffled me a little when I first heard of it. Another fun fact: I may have been reading Star Trek books recently and having a lot of sappy feelings about Spock’s touch telepathy and Kirk and Spock’s t’hy’la-ness.
> 
> As always, comments are very welcome and I hope you’re doing alright. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
